Big Hollow School Board Meeting 12/14/2020

001yes yes yes yes all right for the month of november the administration would like to honor the following individuals who've been nominated by staff and selected by the administration for the following awards are the first is student of the month mr mason martin second grade student hey mason come on up how are you doing congratulations i have a couple of things for you and mr lyons is going to come up here as well first of all you're going to take that and put that on your desk at home okay and here you go and uh we got a couple of your teachers here that nominated you okay let's get a picture with with congratulations joe come back here and all right so i'm gonna let a couple people you can stay right up here okay

002i'm gonna let a couple people share it go ahead mr russell awesome awesome great great awesome renee jackson [Music] um that's great congrats bud thank you thank you all right in our employee of the month uh [Applause] you were nominated by several people let's get a picture real quick here with mr lyons and i got it okay so you were nominated by actually several people i'm gonna let mr whipple your principal first step up and say something because doing a great job of collecting data and getting books that are more um equitable and really making sure that our library represents all of our students which is phenomenal um she thinks of things that i don't even think about going above and beyond to make sure reading is a priority getting into all the classrooms of

003our ela teachers even convinced me to spend money to put a dropbox out there she's very convincing so we did it to make sure that families when they want to return books can do it after hours and don't have to worry about our kids having to bring it in so she does phenomenal work down in library just really branching out to all of our staff and making sure reading is a priority for our kids so she's done a fabulous job i will i will echo those comments and i'm just going to read you i could pick out many of these but here's one that just says kiera has become a valuable part of big hollow our library at middle school has blossomed in the two years she's been here she has students getting books delivered

004we now have a book drop outside the students to return their books she has put our library online for access to students has put collections together for all content areas as well as co comb the books in the library to make sure that we have what kids actually want to read her dedication library has been unparalleled to any other aid we've had that's pretty well said there so thank you so much anything you want to say yeah you've done a great job and i just gave you all the comments that your colleagues made so all right thank you thank you thank you very much all right the next item is item number seven board member quote of conduct review tiffany you're up okay i will strive to keep my board focused on its primary work

005of clarifying the district's purpose direction and goals and monitoring district performance all right thank you anybody have any questions on the consent agenda i have a quick question guess i saw that were put a bunch of like was it five thousand dollars into the boiler repairs and then i'll have to check because if there's that much we do this is the time of year we do a lot of preventive maintenance to get ready for the winter season but i don't know if that was it or not so i'll have to check i know i saw when i was like i can't remember that terminology when it was written up from you know what there was issues with a boiler when they went to look at like the um i can't remember what it was let's

006see here sorry the health safety oh life health safety was that the boiler being repaired in connection with that or was that no um no that was yeah that was just a minor issue there i'll have to do some checking on that for you tomorrow i will get that because the boiler ready to go yes no major yeah everything's good no major repairs other than just preventive stuff to get ready for the year but i'll double check and look at back at our invoices and just make sure that uh i'm telling you that correctly but yeah anything major they'll usually come and talk to me about it and there was nothing at that point so all right anybody else have questions okay please have a motion to approve the consent agenda motion second yes yes

007yes yes yes were there any public comments the superintendent's report okay starting with starting with exhibit 11 we have the monthly board policies and when i met with the policy committee they asked me to bring up a couple extras i don't remember that conversation okay one was policy 430 revenue and investments just i think there's some question as to how do we do investments when do we do investments those kind of things and pma in fact i thought i'd have it for this board meeting but i'll have it i'll have it at the next board meeting pma does the cash flow analysis for us every year and uh the purpose of that cash flow analysis is to determine if we have money available if we have money available for uh investment purposes and so they

008determine how much cash we need when we need it and uh and then what we have in the bank at the time if they if we have money that doesn't need to be liquid for six months they'll put it in a place where we can draw some interest on it so that's pma's role in our investments that's up until just a few years ago we didn't even have the cash flow to do that now we do and so they just they basically take our fund balances and make and assure that we have as much uh that we're getting as much interest out of that as we can so bob do we call them the chief investment officer if the board policy states um so i i would probably be that but i'm but i'm using

009pma to do the for the service okay okay and then the next policy was just another reminder on board communications and uh i think that uh in fact i might have when that might have been before that one yeah yeah two 140 this first one yeah just just a reminder for us it uh it's a good one to throw in there and um there's confusion sometimes as to uh when emails go to when is it appropriate for board members to email the whole board about a topic as long as that topic's not going to be something that's going to result in a formal board decision then it would it would be okay so if it's something that's going to lead eventually to a decision that's going to be made voted on by the board it's

010not something that should be talked about in email so and i'm trying to i'm trying to make sure that i get better at emailing the entire board uh with you know when i've got issues that come up i think i sent the whole board of email today with something that i was responding to so so it says in here electronic communications limited to disseminating information and messages not involving deliberation debate or decision making so that's that's even something that we don't vote on but we just discuss correct or i think the decision would be that's the uh to me that would be voted on but because support when a board makes a decision as a board you're voting on it i think it where it could the way the the isa attorney explain it to

011me because i asked him this question just kind of because i know i want to make sure we do this right it's if we're deliberating over something that leads to a decision by the board that we can't do okay and you guys are really you know we have very little uh email action that goes on across the board and i think when it that's why we have questions because when it when it when it does happen because it happens so rare uh we'll make sure we do it right so so i would think for decision making that's any decision we would give regarding any directive not necessarily you know just to vote on but if we're you know given a directive to you to do something that needs to be at a board meeting yeah

012where we're all here to discuss it in front of the public right so any decision that we're making needs to be in front of the public at a publicly convened meeting that's why i take the policy because we don't always need to vote on everything but we do need to talk about it as a board okay so that's a good point so i guess if anybody ever senses a communication that's gone bad then we just need to bring it up right away like a communication email you know an email that's gone it's gone you know it's gone over the line all right i'm going to jump into item b so i'm going to start with this i'm going to go ahead and get head up to the podium here we have a few guest speakers

013here tonight so i'm going to start by just letting you know we've gone through the last few weeks just trying to prepare for you as a board what our what our impact has been of the covet 19 pandemic on our schools and our families our kids staff kind of talk about where we're at right now how do we get here and where we're going to go what are we going to do next and i'm going to start by letting dr king kind of take take the lead on the start and going to talk about some of the research that this they've done not research but the the data they've gathered through the focus groups and surveys and conversations so i'm going to let i'm let them start and then i'm going to take it from

014there so go ahead thank you okay yeah we could i mean i guess we're socially distancing but okay so okay so thank you all for letting us present to you tonight on the impact of colbit and remote learning we're going to start with introductions and i'm going to start with simon if you can go ahead and introduce yourself and i'm going to kind of jock you around the microphone to the speaker so people at home can hear the presentation as well okay good evening everybody my name is simon vasey and i have a daughter in sixth grade evelyn and a son in second grade oliver and i helped facilitate a few sessions and it was a lot of fun very interesting i'm glad i participated i'm looking forward to sharing what we learned with you

015all tonight hello my name is laura grimes and i am a parent of a fifth grader who has been a big hollow since kindergarten and i had the pleasure and honor of actually doing two focus groups for uh about the pandemic uh hello my name is abby sofsky i'm a seventh grader and i led some student focus groups hi erin pittman director of student services hi jessica coletto scott i am a fourth grade teacher at the elementary building dr hetrovitz director of curriculum and instruction okay thank you all right and i think it's important that we just recognize that we had a variety of facilitators so abby like she said she did student focus groups we had jessica she led some teach some staff focus groups so we wanted to really get a full picture

016of what we were looking at moving forward so so our agenda for the presentation is um on the second slide um so we'll start by kind of going over the inquiry process and how this whole report was developed and where we got our data from and just the steps that were taken and then we'll talk about our student findings our community findings staff findings and then we'll talk about some conclusions and some next steps so the first step or the first task that we have on our list is to discuss the inquiry process so there were two phases for this project the second phase of this will be sharing data about how our students are currently performing based on academic and social emotional data and the report that will be presented at our next board

017meeting will be a fuller picture but we we do want to talk about our winter map assessments at that point possibly some desa data and other data to compare current outcomes to previously earned outcomes okay so the first phase of this um it is a research project that we did um the first phase conducted we did a data collection utilizing focus groups interviews and surveys to better understand the perspectives and feelings of our community focus groups are different than any other and interviews are different than if you were to do like um having just parents come or family members just come and just talk off the cuff they are really developed around specific themes researchers are looking to answer and we were looking to answer questions related to feelings of safety and feelings of control

018do people feel like they're in control of the situation they have in their households and and beyond and do they feel like learning is making like progress that they should be making and then overall impact so when you look at a focus group and then the survey data the beauty of the survey data it helps reify and confirm our focus group we had a lot of students and staff and community community members in these focus groups but the the way we would design them it intentionally forces themes to come out versus allowing there to be just general ideas to be shared about random things so we forced a conversation around specific things that we are looking to answer to help in it help you and make informed decisions that anonymous survey that we gave i

019will talk about specific data that was collected from that but what i'll say is we had 47 participants in the community district and students participate in this focus group and then we'll also at the very end of this just in case we have some people that do need to get home from our facilitators and we'll go over some of the the academic report card data and share that we were going to weave it through and then we realized it might be a longer conversation and so out of respect for our facilitators we're gonna i pushed it to the end okay so we're gonna move into our student findings and when we look at our student findings we had first through fourth grade for our surveys we had 172 responses on the online survey that went

020out um and that's from about a 690 total students in that age range that gives us a six percent margin of error and i tell you this because the smaller the margin of error the better chance that you can feel confident that the data that you're looking at reflects the community um and then fifth through eighth grade responses we had 437 responses by the time i closed out the report so i could start analyzing it out of about 795 total students and that brings us down to a three percent margin of error so i'm going to turn it over now to abby she conducted our interviews and our focus groups for students and so she is going to share and present those data hello isn't it surprising that 77 percent of the student survey responses

021for students in grades one through eight indicated that they learn and pay better attention at school and one of the main challenges expressed multiple times in the student focus groups was a feeling of disorganization and insecurity about meeting teacher expectations students share that they can chat with their teachers but it is not as helpful as being able to raise their hands and the teacher just walking over to help them in the same way over 80 percent of the students who participated in a survey indicated that they feel more connected to their teachers when they pay attention to them in person over 90 percent of the students surveyed and 100 of the students interviewed or in focus groups indicated that they see their friends more when they're in school while there are some students who are

022nervous about coming to school 57 percent of the students survey stated that they are not afraid to come to school if safety measures are in place and these are some questions that i answered what were your overall impressions of the comments shared during the focus groups you facilitated and i answered everyone seemed pretty positive um there wasn't really that many negative like opinions or yeah and what were you most surprised about hearing um i was most surprised that everyone was comfortable returning to school like right now in this current situation we were in and the most common concern i heard was um that they were worried about getting coven spreading it yeah that's all i have thank you abby thank you very good very good job so the survey was also sent out to all

023of the families here at the hollow and we received 396 responses so it gave a four percent margin of error so again like dr king said that sorry a a good representation then of what the community is trying to say so we have we had several um parents facilitate some of the meetings and so ally and sasha hearns could not be here but they had facilitated some community meetings as well but we have laura grimes and simon daisy who also gets more information okay can you hear me okay yeah okay uh so we we took a look at uh student learning and about 87 of the participants that were surveyed actually indicated that they believe their child learns best when they're in person compared to remote and that left you know still a little over

02410 of the participants that were expressing that they were indicating that their child is performing well in a remote setting so um while many of the participants in the focus groups indicated that their children learn better at school we did hear some responses about students who were actually doing better in the remote environment and the others were showing confidence you know because they could work on their own pace this was usually more often distinctively seen at the older grade levels and was kind of determined on the student learning characteristics so the comments that were made by some of the focus group participants indicated variations in perceptions of student learning there were comments that were indicating that maybe one child maybe felt real benefit from remote learning while it may not be beneficial for some others

025maybe those are maybe more at risk or struggling and the survey data would suggest that the majority of families are worried that their children will fall behind in school because of remote learning for the next slide if it's up there i can't really tell sorry yeah yep okay so i'm gonna talk is that good sound good okay um i'm going to talk a little bit about feelings this is one of the themes that we talked about during the focus groups and as you can imagine there was an extreme amount of emotion that went on and you can even feel that through virtually to be honest with the parents and the passion about their beliefs and what they were feeling there were there are a couple of things i'm going to talk about one is work

026life balance was mentioned a lot and it described their experiences of trying to imagine manage a kid or multiple kids as the remote learning plus doing their workload what i also heard within that even if they weren't working parents working with kids remotely was very challenging and difficult in addition to families experiencing some severe symptoms to covet itself was pretty heartbreaking to hear uh safety was another common theme among the parents and you know they were trying to really do their best to prevent getting the virus so that was one of the things in terms of safety other parents felt truly that the big hello staff have really done everything they could to kind of put safeguards in place and with that feeling comfortable with them as soon as you guys open the door that

027they want to come in so they really have valued all the efforts that went and thought process that went with that in regards to statistics the results also confirmed that 66 percent of families plan to send their child back when the doors open so it's 66 is the statistic on that from the focus groups in the survey and then 60.4 percent would like the district to set basically an established date the two week two weeks here and there it's just too much for families to kind of plan and kind of have a routine with kids so telling a kid you know nope we're not going back i mean it was just a lot on the household so thank you okay we also um talked about feelings and social emotional aspects for students and parents and

028it was pretty evident in a lot of the responses some of the parents felt that their child just desperately needed to be back in person so that they could make connections with their peers and with the other teachers however there were several families who also tested the opposite being true in that they really felt like there was maybe too much emphasis on social emotional activities and discussions around that and they would would prefer to see more conversations sticking to kind of academics um and i think like the quotes is up there i remember the parent mentioning this that for them they felt their their child was they were fine they were happy they didn't need so much of a focus on social emotional and there should be more academics but nevertheless there was uh 55

029of the participants in the survey did indicate that their child does feel more stressed about learning remotely um than before switching to remote learning okay we also we looked at multiple community participants describing their experience unfortunately of losing a relative to covet 19 and the the grief associated with the loss for their family in addition community members stated that they felt the school district administration and the teachers were extremely responsive to their individual family needs and really appreciated the district asking for parent feedback to figure out how to make the best decisions for the big hollow community community members explained that they did appreciate the flexibility and understanding being offered by the district in this really uncertain time and frankly it was it was good to talk to people face to face even though it

030was through zoom versus arguing about things backwards and forwards on facebook groups it was i think it was very respectful conversation and i i think it was a good platform to to really hear all different sides and aspects of the story um personally i i've i definitely found it surprising that your parents uh were concerned to send back their kids but it was often because they were more worried about the things that were out of their control you know what other families were maybe doing if they were respecting social distancing or mask wearing not so much the plans at the school i think they felt confident that the schools were going to be able to do everything they possibly could for the kids once they did come back a common concern i picked up within

031my groups was kind of a feeling about the amount of teaching time or contact time with the teacher was less than maybe it could be they were you know like i mentioned earlier they were a lot of parents were hoping to see more academics come through in that contact time and parents were in both the groups i worked with were very concerned about what they were seeing with the uh the kind of loss of physical health of their kids um you know with the with the drop-off of sports and physical activities and they were very concerning you know the for the health uh worries for their their kids as they're missing out um oh another thing they were they were talking about kind of the rigor of some of the asynchronous work i think maybe

032um that could maybe be a little tighter that a lot of the parents were mentioning kids were finishing quickly with their work and maybe jumping on youtube and other things like that um so kind of some concerns more about the asynchronous side of things i think that's over to uh that's me thank you so i did two focus groups as i stated before my overall impressions i have a few points with that and um that they were really pleased with the teachers and the hard work and the dedication that they have for the students that came through loud and clear so thank you very much to all the teachers and all the ammon that have really worked really hard with this the communication with parents was really good when concerns arised so that so the

033response from teachers or administration were really helpful trying to navigate through all this and that parents were really happy to have a voice in this forum so they are in hopes to actually continue this forum moving forward at least they had a voice and can kind of express themselves parents shared the difficulty with the balance i've definitely heard that loud and clear throughout both of my focus groups just the pain and agony of trying to i think it gives a new respect to teachers to be frank so that was great um there was a lot of inconsistency with asynchronous and synchronous learning so although that some felt that they didn't have enough time with the teacher and the way they got off quickly and they could do um a little bit of the asynchronous work

034others actually felt that they were on the whole time and that there was so much work that they were doing it after hours at the end in the evening uh so there was a big con i mean i don't know controversy i guess or inconsistency with that across the board so i found that um quite interesting actually and then just the last minute changes were very difficult for parents and fridays especially that was a real tough kind of topic about you know we go from nine o'clock in the morning and then we go to 7 30 in the morning so that's switching and then changes that happened in the building last minute meetings being on that was very confusing for kids to kind of navigate the struggle for students in special ed was ex was

035very much expressed um in regards to both groups so getting their iep needs met or firefox or needs which i'm sure you all know but that was pretty strong in the groups and then just the emotional impact and struggle for students and for parents being overwhelmed in the household somewhat just unbearable about deaths that have happened through the pandemic the aftermath from having actually coveted and having lesions on their brain and headaches i mean it was just very heart-wrenching or people losing their job so that was really tough to kind of hear you know as a parent for sure um most surprisingly honestly the the honesty from parents and the respect and just being respectful even if they had different views i thought was awesome i was a little worried about that so i wasn't

036really sure how that was going to go and just the spectrum of people either really so focused hard on academics versus social emotional learning or vice versa that was a very strong impact for me and i was really surprised about that um i already talked about my overall impression which kind of leads to my i was surprised about the inconsistencies in regards to the asynchronous and the synchronous learning and that um that there were there was a several parents that talked about not really wanting social emotional learning and i was really surprised that in the same breath they were concerned that their kids weren't connecting so i guess it's just how you i was surprised by that because i feel like that is social emotional learning connecting with your peers so that was a little

037controversy for me the most common concerns was the needs for 504 iep students um friday's schedule was a hot topic if you will and then just really wanted the kids to get back in the building i was really surprised about that so i thought that was really um they just really want to get kids in which is good i mean they they do need to come in the building but i would say that just the strain i leave with the strength and the meltdowns that are happening at home with kids because they're really struggling academically was painful it was really painful to hear thank you thank you okay so part of the staff findings we did um we did collect data from nearly 250 staff members um i'm sorry 140 out of 250 staff members

03896 of the 129 staff members who have interactions with students on a regular basis participated so the margin of error is below 5 with a confidence interval of 95 percent and jessica um like we said has conducted some focus groups with our staff and so she's going to go over some of that data and we also wanted to acknowledge sue morrison and stephanie colada as they also facilitated staff focus groups hello um so there was a lot of conversation um centered around um how disconnected teachers are feeling from students um so even though 63 of the survey respondents said they're able to have one-to-one conversations and they have the face time over zoom and the synchronous instruction um it's just not the same as like that true connection that you have like when you're in

039the classroom face to face with the kids because it's just not you know with the technology and everything it's just not exactly quite the same as a normal face-to-face conversation um and then overall one specific comment that really um touched on two themes were looking at learning and feelings um so the question was what part of the teacher experience has changed due to remote learning and the pandemic and how does that change make you feel um so there's definitely more of an emotional toll for all of our stakeholders kind of going along with the threads of parents and community members so again it's just not even though there are those synchronous moments which is better than in the spring it still just hasn't had the same effect in terms of social emotional and building those

040connections and relationships this is some of the survey data and results so um there's definitely a divide between um feeling safe enough to return um and not again everybody has kind of their own circumstances but it definitely came through that um overall the staff did prefer to have a set date just so that for plans with child care and other situations that that could kind of be established and then again that could also be influenced but that again that work-life balance it was very difficult to manage you know the work life balance of kind of planning for remote which is a lot different than planning for in person and then again having child care and different those kind of different aspects and place too and again this is just how staff kind of felt about

041a set date rather than the two two weeks so these two quotes were kind of just again in line with a lot of what you've already heard just about not knowing and kind of just meeting that set date for some plans is how a lot of people feel and then this next one was very impactful too just to hear how um stem staff members lives have really been affected by colvin and having lots of family members or just different situations and family situations occurring just due to the pandemic and the quarantining kind of just being kind of more isolated so it just was very kind of just i again my situation is different than maybe other staff members so it was just interesting just to see really truly how affected some of our staff members

042have been as well as some of our families okay all right so then these are just some of my impressions um so overall um the comments shared were that the limited social interaction really did have that impact because again it's just you know having to also just you know balance that at the academics and sel like just finding that right balance has been challenging because every student does need it a little bit differently and just being able to access students is a little bit different than when you're in the classroom because when you're in the classroom you can kind of be like all right i'm gonna pull johnny here for a little extra you know whatever social or emotional or academic they need and now you have to kind of schedule it and make sure

043they're on zoom and everybody's available so that was kind of different and then just kind of balancing being safe and then wanting to still be in school because a lot of people despite their situations they understood that it's better to be at school with kids but then you know again just balancing what's safe and what's what's in the best interest for kids social emotionally and academically what i was most surprised about was that in all three buildings no matter if it was primary elementary or middle there were very similar challenges just even hearing that in eighth grade most of these eighth graders are using the chat instead of talking on the camera like that was very impactful because i would think like the older kids would be maybe a little more willing to be on

044camp like you know using their voice on the camera than some of the younger kids and vice versa so that was kind of interesting and just having similar technology difficulties and varying levels of home support because definitely depending on the home support and circumstances it's more successful for some students than others and then last one was most common concern was just the lack of feeling connectedness with students so just again not having that connection and it's not the same or as strong it's better than it was in the spring because we've had more synchronous time with the students but it's still just not quite where we want it to be um and then also just um balancing the work life balance too because just a lot of us want to i know we all want

045to make sure that we're doing what we can for students and it's rigorous and it's appropriate for everybody but it ha it has just been a lot more hours spent trying to make sure that the level of instruction that we're giving is the quality that we want it to be in school so that was a lot of what i heard too is just everybody's trying we have a lot of great resources from the district to utilize it's just figuring out that balance and what what can we do to make sure that the instructions as good as it can be like as if we were in school so so overall looking at the focus groups and the survey data you hear a lot of the common themes throughout all of the information that was just shared

046one of them is looking at safety and setting a firm date to return so you're hearing people say that they would like to know when they're coming back if there is a need to close whether it's a classroom or a building they'd like it to follow the guidelines of the two-week quarantine but not necessarily shutting everything down but really focusing on the set date the second one is again looking at safety as far as being cautious but ready to return to school so people would like the schools to reopen following the safety procedures if they don't feel comfortable sending their students back having that option still of having virtual learning but people understand quite personally the cost and many still want to send their children and then the sel component so we're hearing some who

047say that it's overdone and that we need to focus on academics but then we have others who feel like we need a lot more but the majority still say though it's best served in the school okay so those were the basically the themes you were trying to pull out from the survey and the questions and but there were um also two aspects that came out in one of them came out in every single focus group um and then the second same the learning theme so i'll talk about technology um and i'll then i'll let dr hedgefits talk about asynchronous and synchronous learning so these were all the other pieces that i i couldn't not include in the report because they came up so often that it required us to follow up um and what i

048want you to know about the the technology piece so there were several items and you'll read in the report some of the specific things teachers or excuse me the community staff and and students that have all talked about in relation to technology as some of their concerns um but what i can say is that the director of technology so matt has had on his radar it's already been on their roadmap to address purchasing new devices and that was done prior to things starting to fall apart and yet it just takes time for certain budget items to be allowed to move through the um move through the process of when we're allowed to purchase them and so those are gonna there's a good handful that's gonna be rolled out in the spring so that that has

049that is being addressed it's part of the road map and so some of the frustration that people were talking about um that you see in the report it's more as a result of like many comments referred to stuff that's been kind of the back and forth on social media or bad or old devices um a lack of preparedness to respond to remote learning that that's on the road map and and it's being addressed already so i just wanted to make sure that i put that out there so because one of the other aspects of focus groups is administrators and the facilitators were not allowed to talk during any of those and i we weren't facile administrators weren't on all of the focus groups and in some cases the facilitators liked us there to make sure

050that the recording went well but we're not allowed to address any misconceptions or misinformation and nor are the facilitators allowed to interact it really because that's part of this research is to allow the community to speak up and so when that was happening and i wanted to make sure that because this is information to share with the board we wanted you to know that that is something that's already been addressed and the director of technology is addressing it and then the asynchronous and synchronous piece came up in almost all of the focus groups as an area that needed to be responded to and so i'm going to let dr hechowitz talk about that because like the director of technology she's already addressed she addressed this before it even came out you um so in many

051of the focus groups like dr king said the asynchronous versus synchronous um was stated as an issue um and one of the other things that was mentioned was that this fall was way better than spring so i wanted to acknowledge that that that was you know a lot of the comments from the parents um they did mention that there was an improvement from last spring to this fall but um overarchingly we've worked with the principals to find different ways to schedule the teacher's instruction so it was nice having the opportunity to try the hybrid for the one week that we did and we even learned a lot from just that process of how will hybrid look and how will we make sure that we're getting that two and a half hours of strongly recommended synchronous

052um time as as b has stated so um prior to the focus groups even occurring dr biancolana mrs janis mr whipple and i all had a chance to touch space and so moving forward the teachers schedules you may have already noticed but the teachers had up until december 4th to incorporate more synchronous instruction and so a memo was sent by my department just stating various ways to make that happen simple ideas of switching the social studies and science instruction to synchronous learning would be a huge step we outlined some things in the memo and then middle school was encouraged even when they're teaching their classes maybe if they're working with a smaller group to leave on the zoom so anyone could jump on leaving that availability of the teacher for more students who needed that

053access so one of the highlights from the memo i just wanted to state that this quoted portion in the report was a collaborative communication from dr biancolano mrs janus and myself um and mr whipple and it's just basically stating here that we we wanted to make sure that any changes that are being made with students schedules or teachers schedules they've been very small tweaks but impactful tweaks but we wanted to make sure that those were clearly being communicated to families so they knew all of the opportunities that would start to become available by december 4th so like i said hopefully you've seen or heard of some improvements that have been made but the last sentence there just says that making sure the live learning opportunities that are being provided are communicated in addition to the

054offline opportunities and that is just in direct response to the the varying comments of it's too much for my child or my child needs more academics so what we're hoping to do is at least provide opportunities for students who who would like more on synchronous to get on and interact with their teacher and those parents who need maybe a little bit more flexible schedule and need just some maybe some more flexibility in general that they would have the opportunity if their child's available to get on with the teacher for those additional minutes or not depending on that family's individual set of circumstances so we will continue to monitor this because like i said up until december 4th teachers had a chance to they were given the opportunity to make some tweaks i know that moving

055forward if we were to go into a hybrid situation dr biancolana and mrs janus have already made changes not big changes tweaks um to the hybrid schedule to ensure that we're honoring that two and a half hours as well so i think that's about it yeah so that will conclude the portion where we are we're going over the focus group information and any of the interview information that we have unless you've got questions or comments that you'd like to ask any of our fabulous facilitators abby don't leave i yet it's great you guys did that yeah yeah i think simon said it really well this had an opportunity for people to have civil discourse and conversation uh in a public forum together was was good very good well thank you so much all right i'm

056going to now slide into the portion where we're talking about the grades um we will continue to i'll continue to share more with you on the reports for the grades but let me just explain why right now in your report you only see you'll see third grade and then we'll talk about the middle school trying to download all of the data for the elementary is very time consuming is when you look in the report you'll see it's done by standards because in the elementary they c and the primary they are grading by standards and so every standard has a different whether it can be proficient it could be developing it could be limited so there's there is a lot of information to try to gather and pool but what we can look at is a

057sample group about third grade i do i have to do this i have to preface these data with a cautionary note because a couple of things come out um one it starts to show that there are a little bit of differences between the teachers on how they give a proficient versus a developing beginning versus limited evidence and that's and they're communicating that with families but when we try to pull it for a report like this what we sometimes find is michelle might give a proficient to her students um she may not give it to the very end of the year because the standard is not supposed to be learned like fully mastered until the end of the year to be proficient so she might might mark all of her students developing just because that's part

058of how kids are learning it's going to be developing until we the end of the year just to be proficient in this i however might mark the student proficient because on this that portion of the standard i gave a version of an assessment a little informal assessment and i found that on way on the way to the mastery you are proficient on that little step to get you towards mastery even though mastery isn't required until the end of the year so we might be in the same grade and we might be across the same hall but we might be giving the grades a little differently but we're communicating with that with family so families know what a proficient it like why my student is proficient versus developing so that's when we look at the numbers

059part of it's a little tricky in that it's hard to know because we might just be doing it differently however it's a easy to see in the case from 19 2019 to 2020 versus 2020 to 2021 in this trimester there were last year there were 211 proficients at this time and currently there are only 121 i mean in the same way you can move down to developing um like it where it says 1394 versus this this current year 1018 and so on um so that's that's the third grade we'll i'll continue to provide we have more it's just to get it clean for you it's taking a little bit of elbow grease but we're working on it it's not as easy as just to tell the system to tell us how many proficients and developing

060and there's a little bit there but it does tell you the story i think that in relation to the fact that um being outside of the classroom for as long as we are it does it is making a difference like it's not as positive of an outcome as as we would have liked or hoped but obviously it's a trend we see across the country all right so um fifth grade sixth grade seventh grade so in your report the board report you actually have i you've i've given you information that gives you by subject area and i need to give and i say i this was very much uh mr mcculley did a he's the one who had to go and pull all these data and so he was the one who had to spend hours

061and hours trying to pull it for all of us um so thank you um and so instead of doing percents of a whole and what you need to know that these grades are all weighted differently because ela there is an advanced section in math you've got advanced sections you have different number of students in different courses so we can't just divide by a whole number because they're all weighted differently so what we did was we provided you the number of a's given for fifth sixth and seventh grade we could not do eighth grade and because and i'll explain why we couldn't do eighth grade in a second but when you look at fifth grade the number of a's given in 2020 there's 366 versus this year 271 and it's so on and so forth for

062each of the grade levels so if for example if i am a sixth grader um the sixth grade if we look at sixth grade the number of b's that were awarded last year at this time was 250 whereas this year it's 338. it's tricky again my little cautionary piece that's in the report this year middle school implemented a completely new grading system and so it's this was difficult in the sense of we're calculating um standards based more of a standard based approach to our quasi standards-based supports to last year they were doing the a through f model so it worked there there's a blending of two different um methodologies here on how teachers grade and so i i do want to i'm putting it out there just as a caution but certainly we can see

063that there are fewer a's um awarded this year than last year yes sir um i guess that's kind of my i read the cautions that you put in here and i i see that i guess that's my general concern and is that when we when all these new grading policies were explained to us and we we gave our support to the board we were told that we remember asking all of us asking the questions has everybody been trained is everybody on the same page is everybody doing this and this cautionary tale tells me that nope nobody's doing this consistently pretty much throughout the whole school whether you're in primary elementary or middle school um we i mean the question or tale says some teachers indicate that they mark students as developing because they have the

064entire year workforce proficiency while other years mark students is proficient um i i'm having a really hard time understanding this like i don't know how things can be changed but yet nothing explained and nothing set in stone i thought that part of the change when we were told this was that the subjectivity was being taken out of this and it was being based on the standards like you just said but yet it seems like it's highly subjective and i guess that's where my concern is um i don't know that's what i would i don't know if you can answer that or not but that's kind of the problem i see the numbers are the numbers um regardless of what the grading policy is the numbers are the numbers i mean we've gone down besides just

065in grades everything very sad very sad and shocking all right with the amount of f's to go from three to twenty-eight is pretty shocking i mean even if we're in school or not in school that's what i was looking at um i don't know it's i guess that's my general question and that's i'm sure it's a little both you have covet and then you've got the grading scale right so you've got both for a lack of work students aren't turning in their work correct but we implemented something that wasn't ready it wasn't ready and that's said right here if not everybody's on the same page it's not ready to go and that's kind of where i'm concerned right i mean for the proficiency i guess that's more of the elementary and primary so can't the

066teachers can't there be a i don't know just a same even grading scale when it comes to proficiency because i think it's kind of absurd that no kid technically can be proficient at something the beginning that you're expecting at the end of the year that they can only reach it yeah i think kids can succeed and get an a because basically you're saying they can't some teachers aren't giving them proficiency so they're technically can't get an a until like the end of the year until they follow up and earn it correct yes and so actually one of the reports memos that i put together this i just finished it this past weekend i believe it's for the january board meeting addresses this very thing okay um i wanted to just kind of communicate out to

067the community and all of you of course the professional development that we have already begun and next steps because of that pd um i can tell you that just being in the district as long as i have been and just working in all three buildings i would say the um the missing piece has really been someone to oversee the work that's happening in all of the three buildings to make sure that we can avoid some of this subjectivity and to make sure that practices are aligned and you know that goes all the way from assessment to you know instruction so that memo i wouldn't be upset if mr gold shared that with you early if you wanted to read it but we definitely have a plan in place now and you know we've worked as

068an administrative team to make sure that like i said we're bringing some consistency and some cohesion to this whole process because essentially with middle school stepping in with the standards-based reporting initiative it's obviously going to be trickling back down to elementary and primary which you know different districts do it in different ways but we need to now align all three buildings so that a fourth grader experiencing some sort of standards-based reporting initiative can now go to middle school and expect the same sort of system so that is a huge goal of mine professionally and we do like i said have some next steps laid out and that will be a process that it tends to be time consuming and somewhat cumbersome i'll admit but it's very valuable work and it's very necessary work right now

069so i'm very excited about it but i'll caution you as as dr king has used that word many times tonight it's not going to happen overnight unfortunately it's not something that you know one person can step in and try and bring cohesion overnight but i will tell you that i'd like to take a very systematic approach especially at the primary and elementary building so that we can't move slowly on this i recognize that but we need to be very cautious because if you try and do too much too fast it's going to fail and we need to make sure our teachers are all ready for the expectations that they will be given as far as assessment and grading so one of the other things i just wanted to quickly address is the rubric development and

070the assessment practices that are going to be happening i would say very very more quickly here at the middle school because we want to make sure we get this right so the training that we're providing for the rest of this year it's sort of an accelerated version of what i would recommend but it's very necessary so these the teachers have identified priority standards they've already received training now in learning progressions which is part of that scaffolding that dr king developed and so once now that we've got the learning progressions done for basically every subject area here the next step then would be to come up with agreed-upon success criteria and that's where the assessments come from and that's where the rubric development comes from and that's where the consistency comes from so that you know

071teacher a and sixth grade classroom is doing something very similar if not exactly the same to the teacher across the hall that takes time but we're committed to it and now at the primary elementary level i will also say that like i said a standards-based reporting initiative is our very very next step because of the work that we're doing with some of the regional office of education coordinators so every single opportunity that we've had this year we started hitting the gas pedal with it so the same thing taking apart the standard figuring out how to make sure it's scaffolded so you can as a teacher very diagnostically identify where a child is starting to struggle and catch them before it gets to that summative assessment so all of that just needs to be put in

072place to be completely honest and you know i appreciate the support of mr gold and all of you because the pd that we're doing right now to me is the most important work in the district and it's it's already impacted our students and you know we don't have any excuses to give you except that we can tell you moving forward you'll see improvements hopefully very quickly but like i said we want to be cautious to and do it right i think that in my and tell me if i'm wrong here but this this situation has exposed some things that uh that we i think have sent that has created some urgency and some things that we didn't see they surfaced on us that we didn't see or that we knew we needed to do but

073just in a pandemic right we weren't sure how to juggle some of moving forward with that too because do you implement it once you've started an initiative do you do that in the middle of a pandemic or you know we had talked as well um mr gold i had asked him earlier this year like what how do you want pd to look how you know are we going to move forward like a normal year and at that point we just had said right now we need to get you know a good solid remote learning plan rolling and so then our priorities started you know started changing as things have moved forward so we're kind of back on that track of providing the pd that is just very much needed right now you have more are

074you done oh okay awesome thank you okay i'm gonna jump back real quick matt can i get your help on this okay i'm gonna now jump back to uh our conversation uh now that we know uh the impact this had on our community entire community i want to steer us back to where we are okay i'm going to refer to a document here on the cdc website that is a uh something you might not have seen up to this point i'm not sure uh the information that's that our county health department has used has been based off of this data as well in fact actually our today they told me that our county actually started the data collection proc or the the creation of the data variables and the cdc followed suit so some of

075what our county has created is reflected here but you'll see that they say the far right the greater than 200 in the first column number of new cases per hundred thousand persons within the last 14 days greater than 200 is the far right that's the highest risk of transmission in schools is what it says they don't say like you need to be in virtual you they just say this is the highest risk of transmission in schools well that number 200 correlates to the the 14 number that you see on our uh our county's website where they say greater than 14 because they do a rolling average over uh the last seven days so that's 14 per day if you take 14 times 14 days like the cdc's got that's that's just under 200. so their

07614 correlates with this 200 same same number so this is the data that the the cdc has put out there and i'm just making aware of this because there's a little more to what they they do as well is that these uh primary there are three primary indicators core indicators the incidence rates the percentage of positive tests so positivity rates you hear a lot about positive rates i think governor pritzker has shifted that number around a little bit they're now in illinois they're kind of using it i think i think it's 12 percent is a uh it's kind of a number that they're sticking with the but the ability to uh for the school to implement five key mitigation strategies you built for consistent correct use of mass for social distancing at the largest extent

077possible hand hygiene cleaning disinfecting and contact tracing those are five mitigation strategies that they have put on their website the reason i bring all this to you is that um i'm gonna bounce back and forth here apologize matt i might need some help here sorry i'm gonna bounce back and forth but um because the the cdc gives us this guidance uh i just need to get back to our uh to that okay they give us this guidance yet the um i'm going to read a direct quote from the cdc director so the guidance is that that's high above 200 is highest risk of transmission schools yet you know just a couple weeks ago the cdc director says the truth is for kids k-12 one of the safest places they can be in perspective is to

078remain in school today's extensive data that we've gathered over the past two to three months to confirm the k-12 schools can operate with face-to-face learning and they can do this safely and do it responsibly here's the challenge so let me start by just telling you this i i'm not a healthcare professional and you know so throughout this time i along with my colleagues have had to lean really hard on the recommendations of health professionals and from the county the state national levels and back in august we had we didn't have data and and so we had to really press the health department on we need to know is this safe or not for kids and for staff we need to know and they and they in our health department in lake county has been very

079good to work with us but we need to know what the severity was in our community all the way down to our zip codes and we were promise metrics on the way which which is why we chose to pause the return in august because we were promised metrics were coming and they did and once we were given those metrics it pointed to us having being able to return in a hybrid model so that's why we came back in october using those metrics to support that decision and then what you know as soon as we got into school the metrics went crazy on us and so uh and so now we for two months we've been kind of pinned in this corner we've got these local metrics that are very high levels and we've got state

080and national health leaders that are saying kids should be in school and and so we're stuck um we're stuck talking you know i've had some very like every every wednesday morning eight o'clock all the superintendents lake county we meet with the health department director and he and uh we spend at least an hour and just going through all this and what can we do what do we need to do next and what and we're all frustrated because the guidance we've been given is that we shouldn't be in school but the the national figures are saying kids should be in school and it's the same documents they're giving us so how do we interpret that last document on the screen and there's so you know so quite honestly we feel like we've been we've been given

081guidance and then thrown under a bus that's kind of what we feel like has been going on we just don't we don't have when the when the comments are made publicly the kids should be in school yet the documents they give us show that there's a high risk of transmission we interpret that is we shouldn't be in school um but obviously so the conversations now with the health department are what how should we interpret this do we interpret it that it's a high risk of transmission but we could be in school or what is it because because what everybody's saying at the national level is that we should be and again i'm not laying blame on our health department because they've been very supportive and really worked hard with this but we're having to figure

082out how to decipher what this guidance means if they're giving us one thing on paper stating another and so what it's come down to what's come down to is really the health department has acknowledged even just last week a shift um and the shift is i i tried to explain it the best i could in this first bullet given more guidance on the impact of mitigation strategies the impact of of hand hygiene wearing mass social distancing giving the impact of that they're recommending that we move to what's called a risk stratified model and what they mean by that is that if we have solid mitigation strategies in place even with high incidence rates you reduce that risk so what they're seeing is that our schools across the state of illinois across the country even in

083other parts of the world who have come back to school after after a government shutdown and with good mitigation strategies the schools have functioned well and have not been seen as super spreaders so the health department is shifting but even as of this morning having a conversation midday i had a meeting with them we're trying to work with them on how to change their their language on their website because it's this is a shift and it it's a it's a it's a i've been focusing i point blanks tell them is that i've been steering my community to these numbers and now we can't just ignore the numbers but what they're what they're telling me is that uh and i want to come back to school i said i do feel like we could do this

084um but i need i need to have some reassurance that um that that i'm not gonna get thrown under the bus by the health department saying we shouldn't be in school if they truly don't feel that way and um so the the talking point is that the shift away from the numbers the metrics are the metrics and they're not going to change that 14 number that the health department gives you and gives me that 200 number you saw from the cdc on the board that is the number that's for for pandemic when it when there's uh greater than that number is a sign of of possible significant transmission in the community that doesn't change but what it does but what again what they're saying is now with these mitigation strategies in place with the blended

085hybrid model because we have fewer kids on campus that are wearing master with that in place we reduce that risk in our schools so i've got i've got a link to our dashboards on my presentation due to time i won't go to those right now i'll just tell you that you know our school dashboards right now you can see it's online both these are online they're our numbers are high still the county the our zip code numbers we're i think the 14 is the bar we're probably in the low 40s right now um so we're it went way high and then it's kind of gone down and it's leveled off so we're that right mid-range right now um it's a lot higher than it was early in the school year when we were out of

086school uh it's higher than it was um the reality is it's probably not going to go down anytime soon and uh and so that's what um that's that's the piece that's difficult the covid the other dashboard we have is that we keep track of uh staff and students that are quarantined or have covered uh and so you can see that online as well right now i want to go through mitigation strategies that we have in place and these are things you've you've seen but consider i'm just going to read them real quick consistent use of masks social distancing to largest extent possible hand hygiene cleaning dispensing contact tracing testing for staff we do have tests now we we've tested a couple staff already our nurses can do the testing it's 15 minutes results we've improved

087ventilation we have signage limitation of visitors screening of staff and students each day loosening our sick leave policies for staff and we have we have physical barriers in place um i'm i'm kind of speeding through this but i'm going to get to some more things at the end here so update on vaccine because that's a big question when's the vaccine coming for educators as of right now i've got a link on this on this sorry i keep forgetting to click this sorry i've got a link on my presentation which i'll share with all of you uh the vaccine allocation chart is a uh kind of that will tell you uh how the vaccines can be distributed in lake county phase 1a is our first responders our health care providers and our probably our highest risk

088person people in the nursing care facilities phase 1b is where educators will step in i think uh best case scenario from what i'm hearing right now is that possibly by the end of january phase our educators will have a shot at getting vaccinated it's a six week process because you get one shot four weeks later you get another shot two weeks after that everything's kicked in your system so it's really a six week process for it to get done but that you know that's that's kind of the best case scenario right now for vaccinations once the vaccination if that all process goes well then that's a whole other conversation for what we do at school at that point once our teachers and staff have an opportunity vaccinated roadblocks if we do return to school roadblocks

089staffing issues are going to be a roadblock i heard a lot from the presentation that our administrators just did we heard a lot of parents frustrated about last minute decisions or two weeks here or two weeks there and i totally get it i i completely do i know this is causing a strain on homes and there are people that would just like to say let's just either get back and stay in or let's just stay out and plan for the rest of the year what do they want to do but the i want to i want you to know if we do come back it's still not going to go away because we're going to have issues we're going to have we're going to have staffing issues where we can't staff if we have to

090quarantine there's going to be issues and and if we have to shut a grade level down or a building down or whatever it's it's going to happen it's going to be last minute but if we come back that's that's going to be something we are going to have to deal with this year during this pandemic so that was that gets in my second bolt there possible back and forth from virtual in person so there's going to be there's if we are back in person there's going to be a chance that happens uh the third bullet i cannot emphasize this one enough and i don't know how else i can say it but it is imperative that students and staff do not come on campus if they have any symptoms or if someone in their home

091has symptoms the issues that we have had to this point are because of that even as of today so we had we have you know someone that was in our building knowingly having symptoms and then now has tested positive we gave him the test found that was positive and now we are quarantined people because of that so that is that is going to hurt us more than anything and that's that's for our staff and our students as well so if we do come back on campus this will be that third bullet is going to be what shuts us down and i just i can't emphasize it enough and i'll i'll keep saying it to our parents too and our staff but um everybody self has to self-certify and if they don't feel well they don't

092come just they shouldn't be coming here because it's going to cause it causes a massive ripple effect through our system and when i and when i start having to quarantine people we just don't have people to serve so so that's that's going to be a roadblock that we we can't emphasize enough so a few key additional points all families if we do come back all families will continue to have choice between full remote learning and blended blended hybrid schedules have been modified to to issues that were raised during our first attempt as dr hedfitz mentioned we've made some adjustments both at primary elementary and middle school we are increasing the bus capacity to two students per seat there's just in talking to superintendents across the state of illinois and just reading what's going on in

093other parts of the country busting has not been a source of of concern or problems as long as we do it right so kids wear masks we'll probably keep the buses won't be real warm because we'll probably keep some air moving in that bus which means some windows gonna be open but it's a sacrifice we'll have to make uh right now so we are increasing the busing that will help us with traffic on campus if we're gonna do a blended hybrid model any communication changes any communication of changes that we make after as of our discussions tonight will be shared the next couple days um i included on this and again i'll send this to everybody including our parents and staff when i'm done but i include a couple of links to articles that are

094related to this but the way i feel is that we have three options as we go forward sorry i keep changing my ipad but not apologize uh next steps we have three options that i feel that are feasible for us to move forward uh option one given that we're not in a state home order by the governor we return with our phase two on july january 11th um phase two meaning we we bring back one more grade level in each building we've already had kindergarten second grade and fifth grade so phase two would be we add first grade third grade and sixth grade as well and then the following week on the 19th monday the 18th the holiday then we would bring back the remaining grades option two would be we just wait until the

09519th bring back everybody in the full blended hybrid model so don't phase it in just bring back everybody at the same time the benefit of option two is that we get past the new year's we kind of get the two weeks kind of get a natural two-week quarantine for everybody i'm a little concerned about coming back too early after the holiday because i don't want to pay the price for that by having illness right away so option two would be we just wait till the 19th to wait till after that's the martin luther king holiday weekend and we come back on tuesday the 19th with a with a full blended hybrid and option three is still there that we remain in full remote learning uh until local metrics get below thresholds currently set by the

096health department again the health department is going to be changing that website not and again the emphasis is not the the metrics are because i i want to make sure i'm very clear about this because i don't want because some schools have not been clear about this and the health department is getting a lot of negative feedback the metrics are not going away 14 that that bar they set is still is still a bar that they set that they set as a signal of of higher transmission in the community possible transmission community however the change in their viewpoint is that's the science the science has now been tested in schools and they're finding that schools can function in higher incident rates if there's good mitigation strategies that's the that's the change here it's not that

097they're ignoring the numbers the challenge that we have is our numbers are high and they really are and it's weird because just down the road in other communities they're not as high but up here up here right now the numbers are pretty high you know we're like i said we're over 40 in our incidence rates right now where 14 is the bar so most of the fall we were between probably seven and 12. so something definitely happened in in october that kicked us up but it happened all over the state of illinois so so those are our three options and i i go round and round on this i mean i i want nothing more to have all kids back to school nothing more than that right now because uh the one week we were

098here you really got to see some you could see smiles through the masks and and so you know you just knew i knew we were doing good things for kids that week and they had to pull them back out was really hard as a board i just want your input you know and i i want to i know this has been a long presentation we just put together for you but we want to give you the impact this has had on our community we want to really lay out the facts to you i know as board members you've heard in our community you can i mean feel free to share what your what's on your mind and i'll answer any questions i personally like the option two um i think it gives families that 14

099day break and grace period after the holidays and on day one all of our kids are here so nobody's gonna feel left out everyone's gonna get the fun of going to school if they choose to i also like that you put in here that remote learning's not going to change that was a struggle during the first go-round right so that would be my selection as long as you know for the families that want remote learning as long as they're taken care of and they want to be at home for remote but then for the families that want to be in school i think option two is great the one thing i should because this is going to be a question that comes up and i i know that you know i've got i know i've

100got a staff of 200 that are very nervous if we if we do this and i know that probably half of them right now are are uh really upset if if if we do if we do make it come back and half of them are really happy but um question's going to be is well what's going to take to if the if the numbers are this high and we're coming back what's what is the how does how do we determine when we have to go back out and what i can tell you on that is if if we start seeing cases then we know that our mitigation is not working so that's when we got to back it out so if we if we start seeing that you know and one of the issues like

101i said that i think my biggest issue i got to figure out is how to keep people from coming in that have symptoms or or aren't feeling well and so that's that's a but that's a mitigation strategy that's a self-certification situation that we're not doing well right now so that's what we have to uh that's going to be one but yeah if that's what's going to speak to us if our if our mitigation's working then we this should go well i know i know districts that i've talked to uh downstate particularly people that i know really well their community numbers are as high as ours right now and they've been in the whole year and they're doing fine but they you know they have good mitigation place and uh they didn't have a health department

102tell them they shouldn't be in school so uh but um so i'm confident that we if we do this right that it will be fine but i also know that uh anything can happen too and so that's that's where that's the stuff that keeps you up at night because i know that um no matter what we do you know something could happen but i have people getting covered right now and we're not even in session and but you know the last thing i want is for a student or staff member to get sick and uh and again that will in the end that'll you know i'll feel responsible for that but if i'm i also know right now that uh you know what's happening in our homes and our with our kids right now is

103is tough and uh so are you confident in our mitigation strategies i am okay yeah i am you know what the incident from today with the staff member yeah that's i mean the the one i'm the one i'm frustrated about is that because i can't people have to give us a true unless we're going to do a physical exam everybody walk in the door that's the one that we're relying on people to be you know like truthful with us when they come in the door that's the one we have least control over but i see like the screening like what i walked in today i took my temperature does everybody have to do that who comes in this building they uh they the the staff who have to get them they get on skyward and

104they certify that they do not have any symptoms uh so they don't take their own temperature they don't take their temperature did they take their temperature at home before is it one of your questions is your temperature above 100.4 is that one of the uh is that one of the questions yeah that is okay so they are yeah so when they take that they're certifying that they if they're not sure they have a temperature gauge when they walk in the door they could they could do it so do you identify the staff who have not taken the survey before they come in we have actually melissa that's a challenge but we do it yeah we know who's in the building and and uh because they signed in when they come in right now but when

105everybody comes it'll be a lot easier because everybody will be here right now we're not sure so she has to double check who signed in and have they self-certified do it every day and i usually forget so then i guess melissa do they get past you before you check that they self-certified yeah so yeah so that would probably need to be adjusted she might need help with that because if they're in the building they're already walking past people right yeah touching things so that if you ask me if i'm confident kevin that's the one that i'm not it's it's not because i don't it's just that it requires us to rely on everybody to do their thing so we have to we have to that's something we'll have to we might have to adjust how

106we're doing it i know it can be fixed but uh i mean i think for community and students that that's going to be tough no matter what you do but i think that for staff it it's got to be a lot easier than yeah it seems like the struggles you guys are having yeah i mean i don't know every day it's definitely going to be an issue we uh i have to hit really hard with them and uh do we have enough subs um because if i was a sub and i was like say i got sick from a student i might have like i'm not getting paid so we're what we are doing we've hired uh one sub for grade level so like in middle school there's four subs and they're coming in right

107now so we when we we started that in august or october when we shut down we kept the subs on because we don't want to lose the subs and so they've been helping us you know with safe center and things like that and so so do we have enough i don't know if we have enough like uh we have um so i was you know roughly one for every eight teachers but we you know we'll also have to if we get to a desperation we'll have to you know we have other certified people in our buildings including us who can step in classrooms so uh but yeah the sub there are and there aren't many other subs out there um even on our list i think we we actually we exhausted our list and we

108had to piece together some positions some would only take two days so we'd match with another person take two days so so bob i do like i do prefer option two over option one do you feel confident having everybody come back at once i do i do i didn't the reason the phase-in was more appealing at one point to me was that was the whole transportation the whole uh traffic flow i was worried about managing traffic flow and just trying to work through that but if we can get and we've already put dealers out to parents about signing up for transportation if we can get i'm we're really going to have to push more to ride the bus the more kids we get riding the bus fewer cars on campus then we're okay that's my

109biggest concern is that is the is the uh navigating the drop off and pickup of all these kids but if we got more kids riding the bus we'll be okay and then it's still going to be about two and a half hours on campus for them yep yep so two and a half hours in the morning and then go home and do their asynchronous middle school is they've adjusted their schedule so that they are not they're doing all of their specials and pe as asynchronous so when they're here it'll be just the core subjects okay and is it the same system in place with the card yeah okay yep any other questions because it and again it sounds it was also very clear that people want to set a date so we would be setting

110a date and [Music] you know we just have to see as that date approaches if there's anything else that's stopping us you know i don't know if we go through some other spike again that we all you know i might have to bring you together and say what do we do but um i think we go with the date we stick with it and then we you know we see how things go well just like you didn't wasn't there a drop off in attendance in the safe centers when there was a spike in yeah cases and you know 40 is pretty high yeah right now we have fewer parents at the middle school i know they were trying to get more students in the safe center but we uh we have fewer parents that wanted

111their kids to come at that point when it got pretty high there for the week that we went back to school and then we had students that were just doing uh remote and then students on campus was there any lessons learned from the students doing remote and teachers trying to juggle that well primary elementary are all but like four or five teachers uh i know one one teacher one fourth grade teacher in elementary has students in the morning and afternoon so he so it was mr summers and i know he has to have uh students on the zoom at the same time all the other elementary teachers have a section in the morning or afternoon with in person and the other part of the day was remote so there was no balancing both primary had

112a few kindergarten teachers that had to do that primarily both and i can ask the principal if you learned anything that did they they have any problems with it or i was so impressed by did teachers the changes i saw from monday to thursday were amazing they did a really nice job you had your fifth grade middle school middle school is where it's more of an issue they've gotta their kids are they have kids at home and kids on site same time how did your teachers respond um they said it was a little weird um but they did great i think it was just it was a it was a change that's all it was for them but they adapted well and the feedback we got was that 45 minutes was a difficult time to

113not only the ones that are the other grades that were still remote they felt 45 minutes was still a tough time um and then when they were here trying to get the kids situated get zoom calls going and then ending and then by the time we dismissed we we try to we dismissed about 10 minutes before so we lost that last period so that's why we adjusted to push electives and pe and ben and choir to do remote learning not asynchronous but they're doing remote learning with the kids in the afternoon or opposite of when they're here so they'll essentially have almost a full day of learning either in person or remotely so so now the periods when they're the two periods are going to have will be 75 to 70 minutes long and then

114we also reduce one of our passing periods which helps with that mitigation plan so all right that's all i've got on that oops sorry about that um in the agenda uh i have a motion there if somebody would uh kevin does anybody have any more discussion on the mobile learning schedule um so does everyone have to say an option or no or just yeah i mean i think if somebody if we have it we'll have to do a vote for each option i think that's not right you could do a record somebody can make a recommendation that includes one of the options just do that okay all right um okay so remember we're directing him to only do that option two yeah yes that's what this calls for as i'm saying so then you cannot

115do any other version right okay all right um it seems from just a discussion a lot of people recommended option two okay please have a motion to approve option two for the blended hybrid remote wearing schedule question second vivian uh all in favor is the motion say red oh it's a roll call vote yes yes yes yes yes yes all right okay that might go down as the longest single item in my superintendent's report history so let's jump to uh item c uh the board policy update first reading exhibit 13. again this is first reading i met with the committee really some just very small changes this this route go around most of it's with footnotes or legal language uh so you can see my notes at the top of each of those policies but

116it would just be uh recommendation to approve those is written for the first reading all right anybody have questions on the board policy update news can i please have a motion to prove on first reading the board policy update motion second okay all in favor's emotion red all right any opposed eyes have it uh anybody have any questions on the bylaws for the bilingual parent advisory committee i just had one do we have to have bylaws to have a committee like this like apparently we have bylaws for the cac and uh we do have bylaws for african american parent advisory council we're working on them for the aap the african-american group okay yep we're working on bylaws uh we're in the process michelle did you you had to have them for yours right yeah you

117did okay i do have a quick question is there any crossover between these groups you know the african-american parent group and the bilingual are they are there any representatives on the cac any representatives on the cac from those groups um i i can say on the african-american advisory group that there have there are the one of the co-chairs was a member of cac last year i don't know if he's participating this year on cdc i don't think so cac was opened up to everybody to apply but uh and as far as b-pack i'm not positive i would say no okay anybody else have questions can i please have a motion to approve the uh b-pack bylaws motion second all in favor is the motion read say aye aye aye aye opposed eyes have it the

118african-american parent advisory committee yeah just real quick uh dr king and i want to give you an update um we have met with this group a few times already this year it's it's taken a turn for uh the better uh i think we got to a point where we were they were wondering the same thing like what's next we've met we talked we hash out things what's next and uh so it's been really good um we have two people that are co-chairing the committee now we're working on bylaws uh uh we have we've secured a uh uh consultant that's gonna kind of walk us through some things uh there's some next steps and dr king if you to i'll let you take it over and kind of talk about that what's happening with that because

119vicky's been working with our consultant and it's been it's been good because it's let us kind of uh step away from the leadership as people that are not african-american and let and kind of listen and let this consultant who does this work kind of help walk this group through it so yeah so her name is jessica oladapo and she's with diversity to inclusion and so she has a date that she's going to meet with our leadership team and the so she's going to do two pieces she's started working with the african-american parent advisory committee but she's also doing work with our district leadership team and our we we now have a district equity team and so i believe there's a participant from the board that will be also on that and so we've got that

120meeting will be january 7th it's a two hour virtual training that she'll start with that team and then january 22nd she'll start working with the individual schools to help them i think address things in deliberate and meaningful ways so it doesn't feel like things are too rushed or too hurried at any of the the building so the bm the middle school excuse me the 22nd then she'll work with the primary on february 5th and then the elementary on february 19th and so they're very short uh concise conversations with each of these buildings and the the the teams that they have in there so we'll start with our leadership team and then the entire building work but it's like i said her her goal is not to kind of steamroll any of the any of the

121buildings or the staff but really to help kind of address identity work first before we start going into different types of different aspects of the equity inclusion and diversity work she'll do so i'll really begin she her methodology is that it's in a way to bring understanding between all of staff so it does not start pitting people against each other so thank you very much it's really good work right now on that so the illinois youth survey results we do this once a year with it's a it's done across the state of illinois and i'll let mr whipple jump in and share a little bit on those results exhibit 15. let's go on okay so um super exciting stuff talking about the illinois use survey alcohol drugs that kind of stuff so i'll go through

122it quickly i want you to um think about it this is kind of a 30 000 foot view of data that we collected this survey is done uh we did it one time last year in january and then prior to that in 2018 so it's kind of like a little bit of a dipstick for of our student body so right now the current data that we collected is their their freshman at grant and then prior to that they're now juniors so we do share this information with grant so they can kind of use it because i do believe they take it as juniors as well so one thing just little disclaimers this is like one point of data in time of our students a quick survey we did in january with them it's perception data

123so how the students are feeling in that moment at that time and then uh we did a cohort i did a little bit of cohort comparisons of the group from 2018 and 2020 but obviously they're the same students but some of it are related to school culture so i wanted to share that and show the improvements that we've made as far as perceptions from our students 170 students participated and at that time 200 students were enrolled here is kind of the breakdown of how the survey went they give a lot of student characteristics demographics all that stuff i didn't share that in this presentation i can share the full report if you want it we thought i'm going to go a little bit into drug prevalence and behaviors drug use contribution contributing factors interpersonal conflict

124violence and delinquency a little bit in the academic and school experiences and i didn't dive much into this one about mental social and physical health there wasn't there's not a whole lot of stuff there i think some of the physical part they ask like how many fruits and vegetables you eat in a week so i'm not sure if you guys wanted to know some of that stuff but there's bigger more imperative data that i want us to talk about is the drugs alcohol that kind of stuff so this kind of gives you an overall snapshot of the different it says substance use in the past year for our eighth graders as you can see alcohol um 30 of our kids it's i got to get into a little bit more of the data says 30

125which yes is an alarming number but it talks in the survey of talking about like a sip of one or two sips of alcohol in a year or in the past 30 days and then it there is questions out there about binge drinking which you see our numbers so that 30 is alarming at first but as we go into some of the questions you'll see that it's it's really coming down to have you tried a sips or how many occasions have you taken one or two sips of alcohol so alcohol e-cigarettes and marijuana seem to be our highest numbers as you can see lake county does this survey and they put out their averages we are above that lake county averages i'm not sure exactly how many middle schools i can't remember top of my

126head participated but i want to say like maybe 14 schools overall participated in illinois school survey last last year this was in the same graph but in retrospect to the last 30 days of when they took that survey as you see we're about comparison 2018 and a little bit higher than the average for alcohol and i only use alcohols that's our number one or that's our highest factor for our students so dive in a little bit about alcohol so really you can kind of see that they kind of laid out there you can see that most of our students if you're going to drop down to cigarettes e-cigarettes marijuana over almost 90 of our kids or more have never used those substances 72 percent have said they never have for alcohol and then our numbers

127are a little bit higher for alcohol as far as consumption you can see it says drink more than a sip or two of the following so it's not getting um not binge drinking it's a sip or two so nothing i don't want to that's that's where that 30 is not so alarming it could contribute to just sips how many occasions have you used alcohol so you can see in the past 30 days eighty percent had zero and then one to two and then our numbers taper off drastically for both the 30 days and in the past year so we don't see as freaking of vacations so i would say that's more of kids experimenting with it trying it but it doesn't go much further than that here's binge drinking and they they classify binge drinking

128as five or more drinks in a row and i'm assuming in one setting but that's the language they use on the survey so obviously 99 of our kids said they do not have more than one or five drinks in a row and one percent said on one one occasion and then another student one percent said twice and one percent kind of translates to about one or two students of that 170 if i did my math right some other things just kind of threw this on there and highlighted i'm kind of going back to that kids that are consuming one or two drinks highlighted with parent permission if you can see sometimes or often is 11 of our kids this could be culturally acceptable in some homes where celebrations kids take a sip participate in that

129celebration whatever but also there's a highlight of when adults with a different adult's permission and that's five percent so there's different factors uh so kids just aren't on their own doing it less about six percent of the students said they got it at a party so they're not going out to get it most of it's happening in their home really readily available to them e-cigarettes and vaping was another big one for our students as you see last 30 days 96 percent of said students said they never have this actually surprised me i was thinking that would be a little bit more higher just because of the use and the popularity of e-cigarettes and how it's marketed to our students but as you can see then it kind of tapers off and then same thing with

130our in the last year 92 percent said never have used it and then once or twice and then it's very small significant numbers of one percent on more occasions marijuana and inhalants again marijuana in the last 30 days or or past year all in the 90 again going to that one or two occasions and then they taper off quite a bit so it's not as frequent of a use for our students still not appropriate it's still not good but it's better to see that it doesn't continue on or the numbers don't go higher from three to five on inhalants kind of similar data so 95 most of our kids are not using inhalants so really just kind of throwing in there a little bit about how contributing factors what we do with our students here

131at school talking about the fifth sixth grade health curriculum we talk a lot and i put fifth and sixth uh this year was the first year we were trying to put health in that wheel for 5th and 6th but so it was just 6th grade initially but they're get some fifth graders getting this as well this year so we talk a little bit about social emotional health the interpersonal relationships conflict resolution and anger management we know that coping strategies unhealthy coping strategies could be using some of these products inappropriately as a way to deal with stress so they tackle a lot of that social emotional health to begin with in seventh seventh grade we talk about tobacco vaping and alcohol and again really focus on what influences healthy choices and then why people might use

132these drugs alcohol tobacco and then eighth grade would get into marijuana and then the heavier stuff with the illicit drugs and again talk about healthy choices throughout that and then why people would continue or why they would people would try drugs alpha alpine tobacco drug use and contributing factors kind of go through this quick personal disapproval how wrong do you think it someone of your age to do and i was actually um a little bit shocked that a little bit wrong or not wrong at all that students actually think it's less wrong to use vape e-cigarettes or vaping than it is for and marijuana than it is alcohol so there's not as it's not as wrong to use um e-cigar or drink so i thought that was a little surprising i thought it would be

133a little bit differently but then when you go down to the risk factors actually there's a higher risk of using alcohol when the kids take this survey than there is to using marijuana or e-cigarettes so i thought that was a interesting kind of counter it flip-flopped a little bit there um parents um disapproval so they obviously they're they're listening and they know so most of our kids can see that um i mean alcohol the 82 to 82 plus 14 was at 96 percent of our kids that it's wrong and they shouldn't be doing it from their parents point of view and as you can see the numbers are relatively high from very wrong to wrong so they know they're listening somewhat this one this one is kind of interesting that when you look at the

134numbers at 55 about 50 percent of the time students are saying yes my parents have talked to me about these things and then the not surprised they don't remember about 20 of the kids because they are middle schoolers they are eighth graders they don't forget what they ate for lunch that day so um just keep talking to our kids about uh not using these these things at home perceived access so obviously like the numbers would go higher i mean you can see that the beer the wine the alcohol is higher students have easier access to it along with e-cigarettes and vaping and then obviously prescription drugs it's a higher access but as you can see the kids are not taking prescription drugs as much okay go through this um this data is not necessarily correlated

135to school it's just in there so it's in their social life in in and out of school but in a physical fight um surprising that 24 have said at least once or twice but then you can see that carried a weapon sold drugs and then been drunk or high at school are relatively low i'd be remiss in that last one to say that that doesn't happen but it hasn't happened within my careers that we do have kids that have come to school under the influence um unfortunately this graph really this one is related to school and i put these up there as a comparison about bullying so 2018 data compared to as you see called names dropped from 44 to 30 percent threatened at school 22 to 11 so i think that's 22 or 27

136i can't read that from here but more than cut in half hit threatened punch uh punched pushed dropped from 22 to 8 and then we have cyber bullying dropped from 33 to 19 percent and then extensive bullying experience any type went from 55 over half of our kids in 2018 reporting that it had experienced at least some type of bullying dropped down to 37. still not great but it's it's an improvement and hopefully we continue to build on that and then experience every type of bullying we had 13 of our kids say they had experienced that every type of bullying now it's down to one percent of our students important dating violence in the past 12 months in 2018 11 of our students said they had experienced some kind of dating violence and it's at

137three just to note there was like 33 percent i think that said they hadn't they were they weren't dating so it kind of throws the data off a little bit when you look at this it's not going out of 100 of when you look at those numbers academics in school just a quick summary that again doing a comparison that when you look at caring adults again they do it in a graph form so four most positive three positive two uh not you know not so great and then one lowest positivity rate on that one so you can see on all four and 2020 of the of the four three of them are above 3.1 so students are reporting that they are having a positive experience with adults caring adults high expectations and then school connectedness

138um and then you can compare that to 2018 where we're below 2.8 or 2.0 or 3.0 on all those and one that we know is a prior priority is meaningful participation i'm just going to skip those because it just kind of generalizes it but you can see meaningful participation at school i do interesting activities at school i help decide things like class activities or rules at school i do things that make a difference so we're trying to build student boys student choice and try to make them more a part of the school in that sense obviously that one's going to continue to grow we haven't gotten better at it but it's a it's still an area of improvement for us next steps um to be honest this is like i said it's a one snapshot

139middle of the year we take this data 30 000 foot view so we kind of use it as just a another data point for us you know giving this to the health and pe department to kind of use it and in comparison to what we're what we're doing in our curriculum um having our social st our social social work team kind of use it along to with this the second step data that they collect and then obviously within our school school improvement or strategic plans kind of just says another data point for us to reference any question sorry went fast good thanks scott awesome appreciate it thank you very much uh item g uh health life safety annual inspection uh christine arts derek swaderski kind of took on this process this year and uh did

140a great job with it the report looks a little different in the years past but we didn't have any major issues they were all cleared up within a few days so just wanted to share that with you if there's any questions on that as you read through it if not the last item on my report is just a annual update i gave you for health insurance we uh the main thing you should see out of this is that we split the surplus with them so this year the surplus was 49 000 so we should have got half that as a credits in december at our last bill but we had negotiated in the renewal this year that we guarantee guaranteed as 50. so we got the 50 000 credit in this month's bill so that's

141it for the superintendent's reports yeah i can uh touch base on this before there's a motion uh i have the uh exhibit 18 is the same report we had last month that i ran through last month i just want to include it in this report as well um the only thing that's changed is i shifted based on your recommendations last month we shifted a hundred thousand dollar into the uh working cash levy and took that out of uh mostly out of education fund buddy so um but the the total levy amount did not change so the other documents are just documents resolutions that we have to have approved a certificate of tax level we have approved and then tomorrow morning i take this all to waukegan and drop it off all right does anybody have

142any questions on the tax levy and the certificate of tax levy coin can i please have a motion to approve the tax levy and the certificate of tax levy for 2020. julia lauren yes anybody have any questions on the employment recommendations in the employment report can i please have a motion to approve the employment report motion sorry tiffany yes yes all right we accepted a resignation of donald pratt groundskeeper effective november 6. no foia reports anybody have any questions on the monthly reports for the board the next regularly scheduled board meeting will take place on monday january 11 2021 with closed session beginning at 6 00 p.m can i please have a motion to adjourn motion second all in favor aye aye opposed eyes have it means adjourn thank you everybody happy holidays